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Oil is the most important and dominant energy resource in the United States, but after more than 100 years of exploration and development, the state of oil resources and drilling activities show that the oil production period in the continental United States (onshore) has become a thing of the past, and the production wells in many mature oil areas have entered the stage of low production and stable production close to tailings. In response to this situation, all levels of government in the United States have formulated a series of policies to incentivize oil producers to continue to maintain the effective continuation of domestic oil production in order to achieve the goal of ultimately increasing recoverability.

Among them, encouraging private development of old oil fields and oil fields that are nearing the tailings stage is one of the most popular policies.

Most of the onshore oil wells in the U.S. belong to the major oil companies, but the big oil companies usually have little interest in developing such near-tailings fields, so these low-production wells or even shutdown wells are usually pushed to those well auctions for private mine owners to buy these wells for development.

Once the wells are auctioned off, private mine owners who take ownership of the wells can carry out development activities on the wells. These private miners may be taking measures to increase production and exploit potential to squeeze the last bit of profit from these wells, but more private miners tend to carry out new exploration activities on these old wells.

All the mine owners who are engaged in oil and gas fields know a truth, that is, the cost of investing in the development of old oil fields is much lower than that of investing in the development of new oil fields, and there are no surface facilities when developing new oil fields, so it is necessary to build roads, railways, lay oil pipelines, power supply, water supply, build houses, etc., and these capital construction and advance construction costs are huge, and the huge investment costs of developing old oil fields can be saved.

In order to find new oil and gas resources, it is often necessary to drill new wells, and it is necessary to invest 1 million to 2 million US dollars to drill a new oil well (calculated according to land oil wells, which varies with different drilling depths), and if this new well does not produce oil, it is necessary to bear the risk of more than 1 million US dollars. And in the old oil well found new oil and gas layer, and then perforation, oil test, so that it production, the required investment is more than 10 million US dollars, because there is no need to re-drill, the use of crude oil wells to resume production, the old oil well on the new oil and gas layer after the oil production, is often a self-injection well, the production cost is very low. The whole project takes about 3 months, so the development of the old oilfield is a low-investment, quick effect, and high-efficiency project.

This kind of project is a chicken rib activity for those big oil companies, so basically no big oil company will carry out this kind of redevelopment activity on old oil wells, after all, to find new oil and gas reservoirs from these old oil wells, the probability is not as good as buying a lottery jackpot, but it is not much different.

As a large oil company with an extremely strict financial system and investment plan, it will not invest in the redevelopment of old oil wells because of such a low probability, and with that time and capital, these big oil companies have long been going to develop new oil fields.

Therefore, these old oil fields are often bought by private miners who have a little spare money in their hands for redevelopment. To put it bluntly, investing in this old oil well is no different from gambling!

In fact, a few years ago in China, this kind of "gambling on oil wells" was still very active. However, in Huaxia, this kind of behavior is illegal, because Huaxia's laws stipulate that all mineral resources in Huaxia belong to the state!

However, those private bosses who have spare money in their hands will often use all kinds of relationships to "contract" a few "old" oil wells from the managers of those large oil fields, and then develop them privately, often making great profits! Some private bosses were only worth a few million before they were "contracted", but less than a year after they were "contracted", their worth was often calculated in the unit of "100 million"!

In the United States, this is legal, and the U.S. government strongly encourages foreign investors to redevelop old oil fields.

There are more than 3 million old oil wells in the United States, including more than 650,000 old oil wells in Texas alone. It would be a great waste of resources to let these old oil wells go unto waste. Therefore, the U.S. government has long introduced various policies to leverage private capital by using preferential policies to complete the development of these old oil wells.

In the U.S., there are auctions of old wells almost every two months on average, and many of the old wells that are in production and out of production are pushed to these auctions. However, the auction prices for producing and decommissioned wells are also very different.

In 2011, a nationwide old oil field auction was held in Houston, a total of 387 wells or oil well groups from 16 states participated in the auction, and the highest price at the meeting was two production wells in Alabama, USA, with an average auction price of about $1.36 million per well, and an average sale of 61.9% of the shares, converting these three wells into 100% shares, the selling price is equivalent to about 2.2 million per well.

The lowest price at the auction was for three defunct wells in Mississippi, which cost $100, an average of less than $50 per well, and an auction price of 65.7%, which translates to 100% of the shares, and an average price of about $76 per well, a difference of 29,000 times. From all 387 wells, the average difference between the price of oil wells and non-oil wells is about 5,000 times, and if new oil and gas layers can be found in oil wells that have been shut down, their value will increase by thousands of times.

In the United States, there have been many cases where private mine owners have become rich overnight by redeveloping old oil wells.

It was at an old oil well auction in the new millennium, and a man named "Scott. At that auction, Californians, for a total of $34,000, auctioned 14 old wells from a small, 229-acre field in Mississippi that was discovered in 1952 and shut down in 1974 after more than two decades of exploitation, producing 4.09 million barrels of oil.

Fourteen old wells in this oil field were eventually shut down due to high water production. Scott. After photographing these 14 old oil wells, Li immediately invested millions of dollars to re-survey these old oil wells, and it took more than half a year to discover that there were still seven layers of oil and gas in this old oil field that had not been explored!

Although these seven layers of oil and gas reservoirs are very thin, after calculation, the geological reserves of unexploited oil and gas layers are as high as more than 24 million barrels, and the recoverable reserves (calculated by 30%) can reach 7.2 million barrels, which is more than 300 million barrels more than the total production of 4.09 million barrels in the oil field in the past 22 years!

According to the analysis of very experienced operators in the United States, Scott. Lee's return on this small oil field is as high as 73.36 times, which means that Scott Lee's redevelopment of the old oil field will make a profit of $73.36 per investment of $1! The payback period for the entire investment is only 9-11 months. As for the cost of a barrel of crude oil, it is only a measly $3.

This is the example of getting rich overnight, and now Scott. Lee is already a veritable billionaire!